Like many, I was less-than-enamored with Batman V. Superman. The Ultimate Edition was much more coherent, but it was fundamentally the same film. This was a very dark story about Batman wanting to kill Superman… and Superman being kind of a dick most of the time. And while I wasn’t a huge fan of Man of Steel either, I did think it had some pretty great Superman moments, which BvS lacked. I decided to try to combine material from both films, focusing on their strengths and streamlining the narrative to the rise and fall of Superman.

Since I started with Man of Steel (2.2 hrs) and Batman V. Superman: Ultimate Edition (3 hrs), keeping the running-time down to 2.5 hours was no small task. A lot of plot wasn’t used (most of the Krypton sequence, the Smallville fight, the Africa subplot, the jar of pee…), but because the major threads that lead to the 3rd act of Batman V. Superman came directly from the battle in Metropolis (the crashed Kryptonian ship, the Kryptonite from the world engine, Batman’s distrust of Superman’s power) I chose to hone in on those story points as the core of the narrative for Man of Tomorrow. Several scenes were reordered or reworked to fit the new narrative structure and better weave the material from the the two films together. For example: Batman/Bruce Wayne is introduced in the 1st act, Superman doesn’t put on his suit until Zod appears, Lex Luthor interacts with the Kryptonian ship earlier, the dour shots of Superman’s heroism from BvS are used much more optimistically, and the flashback to Pa Kent’s death is utilized very differently, just to name a few changes to the structure.